Shopping for bandaids at Walgreen’s

Whose kids are obsessed with bandaids?

Look what I saw while shopping at Walgreen’s: 6 boxes feature male characters, 2 boxes feature female characters.

It’s bandaids, you say, who cares?

These images matter because they normalize the lack of females for little kids. Girls gone missing seems normal, and you know where  this lack of females, half of our population, is normal? Congress, the Supreme Court, boardrooms, and top levels of most professions all across America.

If you can’t imagine it, you can’t be it. It’s as simple as that. How sad that our imaginary/ fantasy world is so sexist that females go missing, get stereotyped, sidelined, or show up as a minority. It doesn’t have to be this way. It’s the fantasy world, anything should be possible. So why is the imaginary world as sexist as reality? What does that sexism teach little kids?

Consider the variety of roles that males are shown that they can play. Compare that to the limited roles that females are shown that they can play.

One reason that it is so hurtful to show females in a minority all the time is because that limitation makes it easy to stereotype them. The more females you have, the more narratives you’ve got to come up with.

By the way, if you’re wondering about Angry Birds, 5 Angry Birds are female: Female Red Bird, Female White Bird, Jewel (Angry Birds Rio only), White Bird and Pink Bird.) Here are a couple descriptions:

Unlike the other birds, the Female Red Bird isn’t an actual species that is used in the game, rather it only serves as a background character used in various materials to promote the game, and is also seen in the ending sequence upon completing Hogs and Kisses, alongside a solo Red Bird. A plush toy version of her was released along with a plush toy version of the Female White Bird.

The Female White Bird is a bird only seen in Angry Birds Seasons. She is a female bird like the White Bird. She only serves as a background character and only appears on wallpapers in Hogs and Kisses, and her existence has led to many beliefs that the basic White Bird is male. She has a naive, maybe nervous expression.

Where the Female Red Bird is approximately the same size as the Red Bird, one image implies that the Female White Bird is significantly smaller than both the White Bird as well as the Female Red Bird. She has the same face as the White Bird, but only with makeup, a bow, and lipstick.

9 thoughts on “Shopping for bandaids at Walgreen’s

  1. I’d like to believe this is because the manufacturers have assumed that girls are sensible and tough enough not to need a decorated band-aid to console them when they’re injured. But it probably has more to do with Brook’s comment that they think boys are more likely to be injured because they’re more active and aggressive and that those male characters are fine for both genders whereas the female characters are only intended for girls.

  2. Ok now you are seriously nitpicking. You want equality but you want one female movie for every male movie that comes out boy bandaid for every girl bandaid. Animated movies are for everyone boys and girls you idiot. It’s not like they are mens room and ladies room bathrooms. THEY ARE FOR EVERYONE AND SO ARE BANDAIDS STOP BEING A WHINY BRAT.

    • Hi Waffle,

      Would you be saying that if the gender ratio were reversed? If 99% of animated movies starred females, crowd scenes were all females, villains and heroes, all female? I show the bandaids to show how derivative kidworld is, and how when girls go missing from kids media, they go missing everywhere.

      MM

  3. Plus of course the fact that the girls characters are fairies and princesses…

    On the subject of girls gone missing, I’ve just fired an email off to my daughter’s school about their after school film club, it’s been running for 5 weeks so far and guess how many female leads there’ve been? That’s right, none. I’ve actually offered to loan them some films from my collection for next week, waiting to see how they respond.

  4. I am so sad, all this time I was pretending some of the angry birds were girls :/ Next they will tell me my plants in Plants v Zombies are all men. This is a huge disappointment. I have to learn how to program computer games now.

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